Uncharted Waters Origin gets a big price cut

Quizzical

The item mall currency for Uncharted Waters Origin is red gems.  Since launch, it has been about $11 for 1000 red gems, with various packages that nearly all gave about that pro-rated price.  You could buy just red gems in unlimited quantities, or you could buy red gems at about that rate with various other bonuses (ship blueprints, gacha tickets, ducats, etc.) as a one-time purchase.  There were enough packages that only whales would ever run out of other packages to buy and get the pure red gems with no other bonus option.  Even so, that's paying money for red gems plus something else that you didn't necessarily want all that much.

Yesterday's major patch added the "fixed term" section to the store, which has four packages available once per month.  Mate ticket is dumb, so I'll ignore it, but the other three are $22 for 2000 red gems, plus something else.  For one of those packages, the "something else" is more red gems.  2800 more red gems, to be exact, available as a daily login bonus of 100 gems/day for the next 28 days.  Instead of $22 for 2000 red gems plus something else, it's $22 for 4800 red gems.  That's quite a difference.

The big thing that you need red gems for is to buy additional admirals, as the ones not available as starter admirals cost 5000 red gems each.  Before yesterday, that was $55 per admiral, which is pretty steep.  Now, if you buy the new package, it's a pro-rated $23 per admiral, with the ability to only purchase one per month at that price.  That's quite a price cut.

Yesterday's patch added two more admirals, and there are four more yet to come that are in the Korean version but not yet released in the global version.  All but one of admirals that can only be purchased with red gems requires company level 40, the other one requires company level 30.  In a slow leveling game, that's hundreds of hours of gameplay before you even got the option to buy the expensive admirals.  By the time you get that option, you'll know if you want it--and if you like the game.  And even then, $23/month isn't bad.

Kyleran

Quizzical said:

The item mall currency for Uncharted Waters Origin is red gems.  Since launch, it has been about $11 for 1000 red gems, with various packages that nearly all gave about that pro-rated price.  You could buy just red gems in unlimited quantities, or you could buy red gems at about that rate with various other bonuses (ship blueprints, gacha tickets, ducats, etc.) as a one-time purchase.  There were enough packages that only whales would ever run out of other packages to buy and get the pure red gems with no other bonus option.  Even so, that's paying money for red gems plus something else that you didn't necessarily want all that much.

Yesterday's major patch added the "fixed term" section to the store, which has four packages available once per month.  Mate ticket is dumb, so I'll ignore it, but the other three are $22 for 2000 red gems, plus something else.  For one of those packages, the "something else" is more red gems.  2800 more red gems, to be exact, available as a daily login bonus of 100 gems/day for the next 28 days.  Instead of $22 for 2000 red gems plus something else, it's $22 for 4800 red gems.  That's quite a difference.

The big thing that you need red gems for is to buy additional admirals, as the ones not available as starter admirals cost 5000 red gems each.  Before yesterday, that was $55 per admiral, which is pretty steep.  Now, if you buy the new package, it's a pro-rated $23 per admiral, with the ability to only purchase one per month at that price.  That's quite a price cut.

Yesterday's patch added two more admirals, and there are four more yet to come that are in the Korean version but not yet released in the global version.  All but one of admirals that can only be purchased with red gems requires company level 40, the other one requires company level 30.  In a slow leveling game, that's hundreds of hours of gameplay before you even got the option to buy the expensive admirals.  By the time you get that option, you'll know if you want it--and if you like the game.  And even then, $23/month isn't bad.

I dunno, what value does one admiral give vs another?  Why would I want to buy a new admiral every month?

Quizzical

Kyleran said:

I dunno, what value does one admiral give vs another?  Why would I want to buy a new admiral every month?

If you don't want to, then you don't have to.  You can play the game just fine without unlocking more admirals, or unlock all five of the starter admirals without paying a dime.  I cite admirals as they're by far the most notable thing that is locked behind red gems.

Really, though, you can now get 4800 red gems for $22 every 28 days, and that makes anything that you want to spend a moderate amount of red gems on much cheaper than before.  Before, getting 4800 red gems for whatever purpose would have cost about $53.

Dibdabs

It looks like a low-effort game designed to part rubes from their cash.

Quizzical

Dibdabs said:

It looks like a low-effort game designed to part rubes from their cash.

Because nothing else says "low-effort game designed to part rubes from their cash" quite like having the main thing that they expect to push players to spend money on not even available to purchase until you're hundreds of hours of gameplay into the game?  It's visible in-game and prominently announced in patch notes, so it's not like the later admirals are a surprise.  But you can't buy most of them until company level 40.

This is a case of you bringing in your own biases and seeing what you expect to see rather than what the game actually has.  The game has an enormous amount of content, and that's not at all compatible with being a low-effort game.

There are about 300 mates in the game, each of which has custom, high resolution Live 2D artwork and animations, as well as separate, smaller pictures.  Many but not all of them have custom voiceovers, too.

There are about 70 named inn employees in the game, each of which has custom artwork, animations, voiceovers, text, and a custom series of three quests.  And that's for a minor feature that many players will completely ignore.

There are currently 2731 discoveries to be made in the game, each of which has custom artwork and text, as well as a variety of methods to actually make the discoveries.

There are over 200 ports in the game, each of which has its own custom map.  Buildings are often shared by different ports in the same region, but there are dozens of regions, each of which has its own artwork.

The main ocean part of the game is an enormous, seamless game world that uses a scaled map of Earth.  Endless water in the oceans is very repetitive, but the shores are much less so.  A given region may have many identical trees, but different regions look very different from each other.

I've seen low-effort cash grabs.  This is very much not that.  That doesn't automatically mean that the game is good or that you'll like it, but it's very much not a low-effort game slapped together cheaply.